The Power of the Image

5

A moral subject: the VD propaganda feature

In the last chapter, it was argued that on one level a film’s textual operations are understandable as effects of its contexts of production. The method employed was an investigation of text/context relations in one film through exploring operations of censorship within it. The essay which follows takes up both these concerns – relations of text and context, and censorship – approaching them through new subject matter and from a different angle.

This work forms part of a larger piece of research, which was motivated by an interest in certain problems of theory and methodology in the study of cinema. Traditionally, most historical – and probably all sociological – investigations of cinema have tended ...